ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — The contractor for a historic building in St. Johns County says it was vandalized on Friday night.
The apparent vandalism was caught on an eyewitness cell phone video. The incident occurred hours after the Historic Architectural Review Board (HARB) approved more sections of the building for further demolition, according to building contractor Chad Schwaninger of KRB construction.
Schwaninger says workers at the Forgotten Tonic restaurant across the street from the historic site observed a masked man vandalizing the building on Friday night.
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“One of the waitresses came up and talked to him, and he said he was paid by a religious organization to be here and to mind his own business, and he finished spray painting the stuff on the building,” Schwaninger said.
That’s when Schwaninger says the masked bandit, allegedly, threw a brick wrapped in plastic featuring the words “Sorry Frederick Douglas”, a cross, and a rope on each side.
“Multiple people called police, there’s people out here sitting enjoying their dinner when this fully masked person, you couldn’t see his face. He had glasses, he had gloves, duct tape. I mean, he was in a full jumpsuit, so you had no idea. Besides, he was a white male about 6 feet in his 40s,” Schwaninger described.
The motivation and the messaging remain unclear. As Action News Jax told you Friday, Schwaninger and the building owners, John and Sonia Rude, were seeking to have further partial demolitions of the city’s former jail approved due to poor structural conditions described in an engineer’s report. They were granted permission for a partial demolition by the local historic architectural board.
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Schwaninger says the owners are now allowed to tear down the entire second story in the front west section, but the jail walls, garage, and back walls have to remain intact for now until a further meeting.
The contractor says the owners tried to save the historic structure. “They’ve invested over 100 grand in this building, and to save it now they’re spending even more to take it down to save it brick by brick so they can reuse it,” Schwaninger said. The building will be rebuilt using its original bricks. The contractor says the upper floors will once again be a private residence, now for the owners, and the bottom floors will be available for commercial use.
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